You Have 2 Years Left Before Everything Gets Rewritten | Tom Bilyeu Deep Dive

Welcome to Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu! In this episode, Tom takes us on a gripping, fast-paced deep dive into the AI revolution—a force that’s speeding toward us faster and more radically than any technological shift in history. From jobs and relationships to economics and warfare, Tom breaks down how artificial intelligence is set to transform every aspect of our lives in the next two years—and why the changes will be more intense than anything we’ve seen before. Drawing parallels to game-changing moments like the invention of the printing press, the dawn of electricity, and the birth of the Internet, Tom explores why this moment is different: the world's superpowers are locked in an AI-driven arms race, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. He uncovers the potential chaos and opportunities of this new era, explains how history’s lessons on disruptive technology can guide us, and shares five essential steps you can take to not only survive but thrive—no matter how wild the ride gets. SHOWNOTES 00:00 Navigating AI's Rising Dominance 03:51 AI-Reprogrammed Life and Love 07:28 Printing Press: Catalyst for Conflict 11:41 AI Cold War Emergence 15:04 AI Race: US-China Strategic Competition 17:09 AI: The Future of Warfare 21:03 Approaching the Technological Singularity 24:17 "Navigating the AI Revolution" 27:50 Opportunity in Crisis: The Fringe Edge 31:37 "AI Revolution: Adaptation or Rejection?" CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Allio Capital: Macro investing for people who want to understand the big picture. Download their app in the App Store or at Google Play, or text my name “TOM” to 511511. ButcherBox: New users that sign up for ButcherBox will receive their choice between steak tips, salmon, or chicken breast in every box for a year + $20 off their first box at https://butcherbox.com/impact Monarch Money: Use code THEORY at https://monarchmoney.com for 50% off your first year! CashApp: Download Cash App Today:https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/v6nymgjl #CashAppPod iRestore:Give yourself the gift of hair confidence this year. For a limited time only, our community is getting a HUGE discount on the iRestore Elite when you use code IMPACT at https://irestore.com iTrust Capital: Use code IMPACTGO when you sign up and fund your account to get a $100 bonus at https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu Jerry: Stop needlessly overpaying for car insurance - download the Jerry app or head to https://jerry.ai/impact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about the moment your side hustle becomes a real business. Now, I see way too many founders stay stuck running their business like it's a hobby. And then they wonder why nothing ever feels real. It doesn't feel real because it's not. I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs build real businesses through Impact Theory University. And the first step in the path to building a legit business is registering it. And Taylor Brands will help you do just that in a few clicks. An LLC, a limited liability company, is an official business structure. It's inexpensive to form and very simple to maintain. It's how you open a business bank account. It's how customers know they're dealing with a real company. And Taylor Brands doesn't stop at the filing.

• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Over the next two years, the life you know will vanish. No warning, no vote, just an inferno of artificial intelligence that will burn away everything you're used to. Jobs, relationships, family, religion, economics, warfare. They will all become unrecognizable by the time a kid born today graduates high school. If such a thing even exists by then.

• 1:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Your job is to figure out what this change means for you and how to navigate it well. So you do not get left behind. That's what we're going to be doing here today. Let me set the table. This moment in history is unparalleled. The world's two major superpowers are locked in a cold war, both battling for economic, technological, and military supremacy. And AI sits at the heart of all three. Charlie Munger famously said, "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome." When great powers are fighting for dominance, the only incentive is to compete and win. What does that mean for our future? America, the world's policeman, is in the middle of a debt crisis. Populism is on the rise, political... Tensions are at a fever pitch. Credible voices see civil war on the horizon.

• 2:14Tom Bilyeu?

  And right in the middle of all of that is the AI revolution. So what happens when an already pivotal moment in history occurs right in the middle of the most significant period of technological change the world has ever seen? That's what we're here to answer. The next two years are going to be dramatic because history doesn't move forward smoothly. It lurches forward in sudden violent spasms of change when people revolt or science unlocks new abilities. Think of the printing press, electricity, the atomic age, the birth of the internet, and now AI. Now, my goal today isn't to convince you we should speed up or slow down. My goal is to help you understand the direction of travel and how to prosper through radical disruption. There's always a path, however narrow.

• 2:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, many, many people are going to emotionally implode over the next few years. Others, though, are going to win. In our time together today, I'm going to orient you towards what's happening and see if we can find that path, narrow though it may be, to winning in five easy parts. This time, I absolutely saved the best for last. So make sure you watch to the end, where we talk strategy for how to win in this insane time. Part one. The future is going to be faster and vaster than you think. In just the last year, more people talk to AI than their doctor, lawyer, or therapist. Character.ai, Replica, ChatGPT, and Snapchat's AI alone engage with millions of users daily, far more often and for longer

• 3:41Tom Bilyeu?

  than the average person consults with a professional of any kind for any reason. Project that forward, and you quickly see how AI becomes the dominant form of social interaction, full stop. But social interaction is just the beginning. AI is already changing jobs, medicine, engineering, warfare, and science. We are the proverbial frogs being boiled already. Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, has predicted that AI is progressing at a rate of 300% year over year with no signs of stopping. Do you know how insane that is? 3% growth year over year would already be exponential. At 300% growth, by the end... End of year two, you're not at 600% growth, you're at 1600%.

• 4:26Tom Bilyeu?

  That's how compounding works. That's 16 times your starting condition. In three years, you're at 64 times your starting condition. Now, listen, even if Sam is delusional and it slows down for the terrifying reason I will explain in part three, it's never going to stop. AI is that moment on our timeline where an entirely new skill tree opens up and nothing is the same after. I want you to close your eyes and imagine this. An 82-year-old man jogs a 10K at sunrise. His knees feel perfect. He's biologically 38 thanks to AI reprogrammed stem cells. His romantic partner, an embodied AI entity who's reignited his love life after his divorce,

• 5:09Tom Bilyeu?

  helped him overcome trauma, make financial decisions, and build a second career on YouTube. Our man doesn't even notice the hum of autonomous drones overhead quietly scanning for threats. He's thinking about his biologically customized grandson. He came out of the artificial womb exactly as expected. Adorable, cancer resistant, and on track to be 6'4" and with an IQ pushed to the legal limit. On his third birthday, they even upgraded him with a neural chip that lets him read and transmit thoughts telepathically to other augmented humans. His parents are contemplating the software update that would let him translate the family dog's barking. As future grandpa steps into his house, he feels his Neuralink chip reconnect to the quantum encrypted network his AI wife set up. The data from his run is uploaded and analyzed.

• 5:54Tom Bilyeu?

  I could go on and on, but hopefully you get the point. The future is going to be very different, and odds are it's going to arrive very fast. All made possible by artificial intelligence. AI entrepreneur and futurist Caifu Lee went so far as to say, "AI will change the world more than anything in the history of mankind." How could it not? AI has already done a list of things so radical. One of them, one of them, should leave you with your jaw on the floor. Forget chatbots. Here is but a tiny fraction of the things AI has already done.

• 6:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Grand challenge, a feat humans have failed to do for more than 50 years. Create new gene editing tools, prove new mathematical theorems, improve medical diagnostics and drug discovery, detected tumors up to four years before they fully develop, gotten over 950 AI-powered medical devices and algorithms authorized by the FDA, improved foundational coding languages like C++, made Hollywood-quality filmmaking and music available to the average person, deployed millions of industrial robots and factories worldwide, and so much more. And that's what's happened right now. As AI clusters get bigger and more efficient, as we ramp up energy production, as AI makes new things possible, how far is it going to go?

• 7:13Tom Bilyeu?

  The biggest challenge in human history isn't something that will happen in the future, it's what's already happening right now. And as I was writing this, LA was literally on fire. It was in the middle of the riots. They didn't have anything to do with AI, but they had everything to do with people feeling left behind. People do not riot when they feel calm and confident about the future. They riot because they're mad, confused, scared, or all of the above. And typically, that happens because of economics. And if I'm right about that, what happens when AI kills old jobs and creates new jobs they're not even qualified for? But we'll be fine, right? I mean, history shows. Well, what does history show? Does it say we'll be fine? It depends, I guess, on how you feel about 30 years of war. And that looming question brings us to part two.

• 7:58Tom Bilyeu?

  History shows change makes people deadly. In the 16th century, a new media technology triggered the deadliest war in European history, a record that held until the 20th century. It killed eight million people, one in five Germans, and left entire regions of Central Europe depopulated. The tech? It wasn't machine guns or cluster bombs. It was the printing press. Before the printing press, knowledge was only for the elites. A single book could cost as much as a house. But after it, books were cheaper than a teacher's monthly salary. This caused literacy to surge, but it also triggered mass chaos via the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther wrote his 95 theses in 1517, and that led to the explosion of Protestant ideas,

• 8:42Tom Bilyeu?

  which then fractured the religious unity of Europe. Over the next century, Europe splintered into Catholic and various Protestant factions, sparking waves of devastating conflict, ultimately culminating in the bloodbath that was the Thirty Years' War.

• 8:58Tom Bilyeu?

  All of that was a consequence of making publishing cheaper. Can you imagine? The printing press simply made it cheaper to publish. But the second order consequence was that ideas could suddenly spread faster than tyrants could suppress them. That's a good thing. But it's not an only up phenomenon. It also divided people along ideological lines. The same tool that empowered liberty also allowed for the spread of propaganda and served to push people into camps, camps people were willing to fight and die for. Sound familiar? Sure. Europe eventually settled down, but that is cold comfort to all of the people who died. And it certainly wasn't that long ago that Catholics and Protestants were still killing each other in Ireland. And history is full of insane stories just like that.

• 9:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Take gunpowder. Overnight, combat stopped being about muscle and started to be about money. A random guy with a musket could drop an armored knight at distance. It was a watershed moment in the history of warfare, but it also greatly accelerated the rise of centralized nation-states. Prior to gunpowder, medieval Europe had been run by decentralized powers, local nobles and fortified castles that could defy kings. Gunpowder, though, changed that equation real quick. Large professional armies equipped with firearms emerged, which required bureaucratic organization and heavy taxation to maintain, thus strengthening state institutions. Scholars speak of the 16th century military revolution as giving birth to the early modern fiscal military state.

• 10:28Tom Bilyeu?

  This disrupted economic priorities and created huge opportunities for those paying attention to the changing landscape, but only for those paying attention. And if you think gunpowder was big, look at the Industrial Revolution, considered by many to be the most profound transformation of human life since the Agricultural Revolution. GDP per capita had been mostly flat for centuries. Then bam! With industrialization, we entered an era of truly exponential growth.

• 10:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Likewise, electricity sparked the second industrial revolution, utterly transforming the global economy. The cost of goods dropped and mass production soared to new heights. From automobiles to canned foods, electric-powered factories churned out products for a growing consumer society. Electrification also created entirely new industries. And by 1920, electricity and related industries made up a huge share of GDP in advanced countries. Jobs changed as well, pushing people from old jobs like lamplighters, candle makers, and horse cart teamsters to newer jobs like electrical engineers, electricians, and skilled workers to build and maintain the grid.

• 11:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, I might as well be describing AI itself. But AI will be far more revolutionary than anything we've seen previously. It's not an explosion of words, or even the violent explosion of gunpowder. It is the explosion of intelligence, the very thing that gives birth to the revolutions that lurch us all forward. So the real question becomes, is this something we should be excited about? Are these technological advances really worth the risk of that kind of disruption? In my opinion, yes, but honestly, it doesn't matter. There's no stopping this train. So if your impulse at this point is to pump the brakes, I'm guessing you've never heard of Thucydides' trap.

• 12:22Tom Bilyeu?

  It's shocking and entirely predictable, given what I know about humans. And if you've heard of Thucydides' trap, then you know exactly where we're headed. More to come, we'll be back in a bit.

• 12:35Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. It's now also available in Canada and the UK. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, make sure you tell them that it was on Impact Theory. That's the best way to support the show. Let's talk about something that genuinely keeps me awake at night. My team at Impact Theory gets hit with phishing scams from bad actors pretending to be me all the time. And they keep getting more sophisticated attacks with details specific enough to look legit. AI has made a lot of things possible, including scams like this. But AI still needs raw material.

• 13:59Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:44Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:52Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it.

• 14:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Welcome to part three. Superpower showdown, AKA AI is really an arms race.

• 15:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Twelve times in history, twelve times in history. When a rising power threatened a ruling one, the result was war. Only four times was war averted. This is known as Thucydides' trap. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides first recognized this pattern when reflecting on the fall of Sparta and the rise of Athens. Sparta could not accept their decline, and Athens refused to tolerate being in second place. This pattern of rise and fall works like a tractor beam pulling superpowers into conflict. And right now, the rising power is China, and the declining power, the United States. While the future is never perfectly knowable, historical patterns certainly make some things more obvious. AI is going to be at the heart of whether this becomes the 13th war or the fifth time

• 15:47Tom Bilyeu?

  in history it was avoided. That's why I don't think of this moment as a tech race. I think of it as an AI cold war. It's not about gadgets or apps. It's about national survival. And when seen through that lens, you're going to be able to predict a lot more of what's about to come. Because when countries are overburdened by debt and a sense of global threat to their hegemony, as the US feels right now, populism kicks in and it becomes existential to maintain your advantage. The US is $36 trillion in debt and climbing fast. There are literal riots in the streets right now, and we're going up against a disciplined and hungry China.

• 16:29Tom Bilyeu?

  As Alex Karp, the controversial CEO of Palantir, has noted, either we win or China will win. And that's going to matter not just to the US, but the world at large. There's another psychological principle that you've got to understand if you want to identify how the US-China conflict is going to impact the development of AI. You have to look at it through the lens of game theory and something called the prisoner's dilemma. That snaps this moment into focus real fast. If you don't know what the prisoner's dilemma is, the scenario where two individuals face a choice: cooperate or betray each other. If both cooperate, they get a moderate benefit. If one betrays while the other cooperates, the betrayer gains more and the cooperator

• 17:14Tom Bilyeu?

  loses badly. But if they both betray, they both lose, just not as much. The paradox is that even though mutual cooperation is best, rational self-interest often leads both sides to defect. Here's how it looks when you apply it to the US versus China as it relates to AI. Cooperation would be a global agreement is struck to slow or pause AI development. Defection would mean secretly or openly continuing aggressive development for strategic gain despite the global agreement. If China defects while the US cooperates, China gains technological, economic, and military supremacy. If the US defects while China cooperates, the reverse occurs.

• 17:56Tom Bilyeu?

  But if both defect, which is the default outcome without binding trust, they both sprint into a high-stakes arms race regardless of all the massive risks that that entails. Given that reality, here's why the US must assume China will defect in real life. One, there are no enforceable mechanisms to verify global compliance on AI development. Two, China has publicly declared its goal to lead the world in AI by 2030. The race is literally on. Three, in previous tech races, nuclear, space, quantum, cooperation has been rare. Containment and escalation have proven to be the norm. Four, the cost of being wrong, of pausing while your rival accelerates,

• 18:40Tom Bilyeu?

  is truly existential in a world where AI will determine strategic advantage. Therefore, rational actors applying game theory would act exactly as the US and China are acting right now. Assume defection, build fast, and prioritize strategic advantage even if that accelerates other risks. That's why in 2017, China launched its national AI strategy with a single bold objective: global leadership in AI by 2030. That's four and a half years from now. Some reports claim that they're backing it with brute force, developing hundreds of AI mega data centers that are already built or under construction. Many are apparently co-located with vast solar, wind, and hydroelectric projects. In provinces like Gangsu and Qinghai, data centers are being hardwired directly into

• 19:25Tom Bilyeu?

  renewable grid. to ensure that their AI programs have all the energy they need. The US, by contrast, is winning on compute. Our semiconductor design still leads the world. We control critical choke points, Nvidia chips, Dutch lithography machines, Taiwanese fabs. Trump's administration even launched a $100 billion initiative to build domestic AI supercomputing centers. Biden also kept the pressure up. Export controls slammed China's access to advanced chips, the goal being to maintain a compute lead and delay China's. But here's the problem, China is catching up fast. Their models like DeepSeek R1 are now within striking distance of OpenAI's most advanced versions. There's some controversy around how they did it, but nonetheless, they are gaining fast.

• 20:08Tom Bilyeu?

  David Sacks, now acting as the informal AI czar under Trump, warned in a Fox interview that America may have a three to six month lead at best. That lead could vanish overnight. And here's the real problem. We might dominate in chip design, but China has more energy. They've built 27 nuclear reactors in the past decade with 23 more under construction. The US, just two. And AI is an energy monster. The International Energy Agency projects data centers will use more power than the entire nation of Japan by 2030. The entire nation of Japan. If AI is a weapon, and it most certainly is, and you don't have the power to run your models, you don't have the power to defend your country. That's not hyperbole.

• 20:52Tom Bilyeu?

  The armies of the future will be made largely of AI-powered robots and drones. We can see it already in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Soldiers are being chased down by drones, and Operation Spiderweb, which allowed Ukraine to strike deep into the heart of Russia without the need for local soldiers, was only possible because of AI. Autonomous drones are rapidly becoming the standard, and it's only going to get more so from here. That's why any talk of an AI pause is pure fantasy at this point. Echoing Karp's statement, one US AI policy advisor said, "Any pause could let China surge ahead." Both Thucydides' trap and game theory make it clear the US is not going to let that happen. Certainly not without a fight. When the stakes are global hegemony, no one takes their foot off the gas.

• 21:36Tom Bilyeu?

  The new great game, the 21st century space race. But instead of rockets, it's language models and metallic dogs with machine guns. Regulation isn't coming. Restraint is not viable. This is the age of escalation because every player knows whoever hesitates loses. But who cares, right? That's nation-state stuff. That doesn't affect your daily life. Unfortunately, that's just not true. I went through all of that so you would not waste your time praying that someone somehow slows this train down. This train is only speeding up. It is full steam ahead for AI. And if you think that's not going to affect you, welcome to part four. AI is a tsunami that will consume everything and usher in a devastating utopia.

• 22:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, utopia. In 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami swallowed everything in its wake. I routinely think of that guy on the beach who simply stood there as the angry wall of water devoured him. AI is that tsunami. The question is, what does the world look like when the water never recedes? In 1968, a researcher built a paradise for mice. Unlimited food, clean nests, no predators. Sounds awesome, right? Nope. Within two years, society collapsed, violence skyrocketed, the mice isolated themselves, and mass infertility swept the colony. It wasn't scarcity that killed them. It was abundance. The study is known as Mouse Utopia,

• 23:04Tom Bilyeu?

  and it may offer a glimpse into what happens when we get everything we ever wanted as AI promises to do. Let's lay out how it might go. AI is going to take our jobs, all of them. Why? Because it's going to be so much better than us at everything. The hard truth is AI is getting smart, really smart. And AI does not have to outsmart us by much to completely dominate us. Let me give you an example for scale. A moron. A literal moron is technically someone with an IQ of about 70. The average IQ in the US is 98. Einstein was estimated to be 160. That's only 2.3 times smarter than a moron.

• 23:49Tom Bilyeu?

  And yet, he had insights that gave birth to nuclear power and nuclear bombs, not to mention lasers, GPS, and a whole lot more. Said another way, a little intelligence goes a long way. And AI isn't going to be a little smarter than Einstein. It's going to be a lot smarter. Now, five times smarter, or 10 times, or even 10,000 times smarter. We're talking millions of times smarter. In case you think I'm exaggerating, futurist Ian Pearson told the World Government Summit that AI could become billions of times smarter than humans. How? Because AI isn't limited by the messy, chemical-laden realities of being a meatbag like we humans are. We have to wait roughly 20 years for the next generation to be born,

• 24:34Tom Bilyeu?

  grow to sexual maturity, and have more kids. AI, on the other hand, is a non-biological system that is only limited by the laws of physics. AI will be able to think at the speed of light and will only be limited by the ever-increasing rate at which it can learn to configure electrons in novel ways. Now, if you're finding this as eye-opening as I did when I first started researching it, you're going to want to dig deeper into what's actually coming next. That's exactly where Shortform can help. If you want to understand where AI is headed, there's one book that maps out the realistic future scenarios, and it's called "AI 2041" by Caifu Li and Chen Qifan. Li was the former president of Google China and knows exactly how this arms race is playing out. This isn't like other summary services

• 25:17Tom Bilyeu?

  that give you surface-level-one pagers. Shortform has expert writers creating in-depth guides with commentary, counterpoints from other sources, and exercises for retention. Shortform also covers the topics across multiple sources with their master guides, so you're not just getting one perspective on AI's future. Plus, their browser extension summarizes any YouTube video, article, or email instantly. Click the link below to try it out for free and get 20% off your annual subscription. And now, let's see what history tells us about the disruption caused by technological advancements. AI is going to change everything about our lives. As we approach the technological singularity, the point beyond which things change so rapidly, we can no longer meaningfully predict even the near future.

• 26:02Tom Bilyeu?

  We won't recognize our world from one day to the next. Ray Kurzweil, the man who has been predicting the future with 87% accuracy for roughly four decades now, says the technological singularity will happen around 2045, 20 years from now. But remember, it's not binary. That's the finish line. We're already headed down the path. Skills that took decades to master will be downloadable prompts. Living in LA, I can hear the sound of Hollywood dying in real time. The patterns that make hit songs are already being mapped. AI can now compose full orchestras to replicate dead artists with eerie precision. I heard a rap song yesterday that when I was showing to people, they did not realize that it was fake. In computer code, AI writes, debugs, and refactors faster than junior developers.

• 26:47Tom Bilyeu?

  And it's only getting better and faster. In my own company, we've been building a video game for the past three years. And what used to take us three months and 10 people can now be done in an afternoon, literally by one person at only slightly lower quality. Even a script like this one, it used to take me a month to research, outline, and write. Now, with AI at my side, I can do it in a week. And it won't be long before someone, anyone, can one-shot a video like this in my voice or anyone's voice. Fanfiction is already off the charts. And most, if not all, music, writing, movies, TVs, painting, books, all of it is going to be created with AI. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Lawyers, accountants, doctors, even surgeons, all of them will see their numbers diminish for sure

• 27:32Tom Bilyeu?

  and eventually, probably eliminate it. Ironically, though, AI taking our jobs isn't the scary part. The scary part is that it's going to usher in a utopia. Now, I can't believe this is true, but The Matrix actually predicted the problem with a technological utopia back in 1999. Agent Smith explains to Neo that originally, The Matrix was designed to be a utopia. But people couldn't handle it, and The Matrix was Going back to Mouse Utopia, animals, including humans, just weren't designed for the easy life. We're designed to struggle against the odds, but technology is the way that we reduce that friction and make everything easier. Whether it's fire, the internal combustion engine, computers, or AI we're talking about, technology is the promise of a better, easier

• 28:15Tom Bilyeu?

  future. And on paper, that's exactly what's going to happen. As the rate of progress picks up, AI will drive the cost of energy to effectively zero. It will make it possible to capture all or virtually all of the energy coming from the sun, and there is enough energy coming from the sun to do and build anything we have ever wanted. And once energy is free, robotic labor will be free. Once robotic labor is free, we will truly be living in an age of abundance. Education will be AI-driven, personalized, and always on. Housing effectively will be free. Everyone will have robotic assistants doing anything they don't want to do, and voila, we're the people from Wally, obese and riding around in chairs, barely able to stand up. Everything will be easier and cheaper, but will it be better?

• 28:59Tom Bilyeu?

  In a world without friction, without necessity, without effort, what is it that's going to give life meaning? In a world where automatic forces threaten to suck us into the abyss, how do we take control and avoid the traps laid out before us? We'll be back in a moment. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor, Pipe Drive, comes in. An intelligent, AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the

• 29:43Tom Bilyeu?

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• 30:21Speaker 01

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• 31:18Tom Bilyeu?

  And we're back. Welcome to Part Five. Where do we go from here? Five steps to mastering the AI revolution. Two stories, both true. One will break your heart. The other will light the way forward. In 2023, the release of a largely unknown AI model called ChatGPT bankrupted a billion-dollar company in roughly 72 hours. The company was called Chegg. It was a titan of online education. But nonetheless, AI snuffed it out almost overnight. No mercy for the founder who lost everything or the employees who suddenly had no job. One of the countless examples of the old getting killed by the new.

• 32:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Next, in 2024, a 21-year-old college dropout used AI to build a startup that outsmarted Microsoft's hiring system, landing this dropout $25 million in funding, all without him needing to write a single line of code. A tale of two companies, both controlled by AI. One destroyed by it because they didn't know how to use it, and the other never could have existed without it. We'll all go down one of those two paths. The only question is which one? Assuming you want to win, here are the five steps to mastering the AI revolution. One, master the AI tools. Learn all of them.

• 32:43Tom Bilyeu?

  ChatGPT, Manus, VO3, Midjourney, Claude, Sonnet, and whatever else comes next. Prompt like a master. Chain tools together. Build automations for any repetitive tasks. Start fine tuning your own models if you're brave enough. Build custom GPTs and find ways to craft systems that no one else has. If you don't know what those words mean, look them up now or you really will get left behind. Train your own social algorithm to keep you aware of everything that's going on at the bleeding edge of AI. It moves fast and you want to make sure that you see what's going on. Experiment and get your hands dirty.

• 33:25Tom Bilyeu?

  There is no substitute for actually using these AI tools and seeing exactly what they're capable of, including where they fall apart. You will often have to wade through a river of endless hype to get to the actual tools that are truly revolutionary. But you will be shocked by how far AI can extend your capabilities. Two, build something real. Write books, build tools, teach skills, make games, license content. It has truly never been easier and this window is going to close fast. Soon, the world is going to be flooded with builders.

• 34:05Tom Bilyeu?

  But for now, you're in a magic window where shockingly few people have actually mastered the tools and are creating with them. This moment reminds me a lot of YouTube back in like 2014. There was competition, but if you had something valuable to offer, you could make millions. I know because I did it with no previous experience. It's all about learning fast and moving even faster. Three, play to the fringes. The edges are where you're going to find the opportunities that are unguarded. That's where the leverage is. My company, Quest, launched at the height of the Great Recession and sold for a billion dollars. Same for Shopify and today it's worth over a hundred billion dollars. Why do these companies still work even in the worst economic environment since the Great Depression?

• 34:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Because a crisis opens up opportunities. It's your job to take advantage of them. Ask yourself, what does AI make possible that wasn't possible before? What niche audience was impossible to serve before AI? What was previously too expensive but now can be done very cheaply? Find a forgotten or underserved niche. Figure out where the freaks and geeks are that have a rabid appetite for your idea. Apple, of all companies, started in a super nerdy obscure computer club. My own YouTube content, which has now been viewed over a billion times, started inside of a protein bar company. Great things often start in small, diehard communities. Find them and serve them with the leverage that AI gives you.

• 35:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Jeff Bezos started Amazon when only 14% of Americans had internet access. Do not wait until AI has saturated the market, which is happening fast. If you want to win big, get started immediately. Work on nights and weekends if you have to. There's no need to quit your day job. Just start building in your spare time. AI speeds everything up. Use that to your advantage. All right, that's all I'm going to say about building. The first three steps to mastering AI are about the narrow window of time that we're in right now before AI beats us at everything. Once that happens, and it will, I certainly hope I've been able to convince you of that by now, you're going to need these next two steps.

• 36:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Four, find meaning by doing hard things that matter. The only thing worth pursuing in the long run is fulfillment. Fulfillment is the one neurochemical state that will survive even grief. Fulfillment is about making sure you have meaning and purpose in your life. And fulfillment comes from a very simple formula. You have to work really hard to gain a set of skills that matter to you for your own reasons, that allow you to make progress towards an honorable goal. Notice I didn't say achieve it. To make progress. If you achieve it, great, but don't tie your identity up in that. It's about becoming the kind of person that you would respect. It never ceases to amaze me how simple humans really are,

• 37:01Tom Bilyeu?

  until the day that AI makes it possible to synthesize and edit our DNA en masse. What ultimately dictates the quality of a human life is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. Don't lose sight of that. Five. Fall in love and raise a family. This may feel like it's out of left field for a video about navigating a world that is changing so rapidly, most people will be paralyzed by overwhelm. But here's the truth. We need meaning and purpose. We need to love and be loved. We need to do hard things. And while I cannot speak from experience, I can see from an evolutionary perspective that having kids is what nature wants us to do. There are built-in algorithms running in your brain

• 37:43Tom Bilyeu?

  that will reward you for having and raising kids. And I can't think of any better default way to have deep meaning and purpose than to raise children well. There are no universals in life, but I think you deviate from that path at your own risk. I don't have kids, so I know you can do that well, but it requires some extra planning if you want to make sure your life has meaning. No matter what happens with AI, love and family will be constants. At least until humans become fully synthetic, but that's a whole nother video. Ultimately, your life should be full of joy. And while I expect that AI is going to knock a lot of people down, and I think a great many people are going to have a very tough time adapting.

• 38:25Tom Bilyeu?

  The reality is that how we respond to this radical change is going to be up to us. Some people will get fully augmented and travel to Mars. Others will move to a farm off the grid and reject technology completely. That much, we all get to choose. Let me leave you with this. AI is rewriting our world faster, vaster, and more brutally than any revolution in human history. There has never been anything like it. Not the printing press, or gunpowder, electricity, or even atomic energy. But history shows over and over that disruption carves paths to progress, but only for those who move. The US and China's AI arms race guarantees that this train will not stop. Many will be paralyzed by overwhelm.

• 39:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Others will die in mouse utopia. But we all have a choice. And if I were to suggest one, it would be to push for sensible regulation, choose the hard path of meaning and purpose, and master the tools while that still matters. Whether it's two years or 20 years away, don't just stand there on the beach and let the tsunami take you. Have the courage to take on whatever comes next and push yourself to the limit. Remember, the future isn't some far-off thing. It's happening right now, and it's moving a lot faster than you think. All right, guys, if you want to see me explore ideas like this live in real time, make sure that you're joining me for my lives on my channel at 6:00 a.m. Pacific time. I'll see you there. Take care.

• 39:53Tom Bilyeu?

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• 40:39Tom Bilyeu?

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